Plato

However, clarity, completeness and consistency is not the measure, but depth.

My Theory of almost Everything is a meta-theory called Special Systems Theory. Together with General Schemas Theory and Emergent Meta-systems Theory it attempts to explain the underlying a priori necessities of a meta-theory for the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. My main contribution is adding the basis for understanding the relation between these emergent thresholds via anomalies in mathematics and physics. A recent summary is here Page on Mediafire. If you really want to get deeply into it seeReflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory which is the long version which is a bit older at Advanced Systems Theory, Philosophy, Especially Metaphysics and you can also see Reflexive Autopoietic Systems Theory at the same site which are the essays I wrote while I was discovering the theory. The theory hearkens back to my Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void also at the same site.

As a sociologist the genesis of the theory comes from a close reading of Plato’s works concerning his imaginary cities. Noticing that those cities have strange properties it occurred to me to look for those same anomalies in mathematics and I found not only analogous anomalies but discovered that the various analogies from Mathematics fit together unexpectedly to give a very precise model of the three special systems called Dissipation Ordering Special System, Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System and Reflexive Social Special System. An introduction to this approach can be found in Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature which is barking up a very similar tree but lacks a complete theory. He calls the Dissipative Structures of Prigogine “Morphodynamic” Systems and defines Autopoietic Systems as “Teleodynamic”. He lacks a Sociodynamic level associated with Reflexive Systems. For an explanation of the relation between Special Systems Theory and Deacon’s Theory see FoundationsOfSpecialSystemsTheory01a01kdp20130703a.pdf. Another important resource isAmazon.com: Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems) (9780231075657): Robert Rosen: Books, For a basic introduction to the area see The Web of Life. The theory also informs my second dissertation at Emergent Design (emergentdesign) on about.me. Many other background works appear atKent Palmer – Academia.edu

Justification is fairly simple. We know that of Everything the hardest things to explain is the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. So an important step in providing a meta-theory of everything addressing how these special thresholds of emergence relate to thermodynamics and the rest of physics like Qunatum Mechanics and Relativity etc. This meta-theory explains how the thresholds are related to each other and to the background of physics. The answer is that the analogies to these thresholds exist in Mathematics and then there are comparable anomalies in physics to those in mathematics. Thus this theory is fully scientific because it has a fundamental mathematical structure that is very precise, and then this structure is reflected in Physics which give analogous hither to unrecognized thresholds in physics that correspond to the kind of organization that appears in Consciousness, Life and the Social. People recognize these as ontic thresholds of significant phenomena but there is no ontological explanation of why these thresholds are possible, and what their relation to each other might be a priori. Terrence Deacon does a good job of rethinking some of the basic concepts that would allow us to understand these thresholds. But he has no mathematical basis for his theory, but merely hypothesizes the difference between thermodynamics, morphodyanmics and teleodynamics. Special Systems Theory gives the mathematical and physical framework of anomalies that define these thresholds and how they relate to each other including their relation to sociodynamics which is a threshold that Deacon does not consider. Therefore, this framework is justified by the fact that there is no overarching theory of the necessity of the emergence of these thresholds which is ontological and a priori, and Special Systems Theory supplies this overarching framework as a meta-theory within which we can place the theories related to specific phenomena at each threshold.

Having a Theory of Everything is not unusual. Almost everyone who is anyone seems to have that. And what is the use of having a Theory of Everything if it does not cover the hard problems, like Life, Social, Consciousness because these are included in Everything. Unfortunately having a Theory of Everything is not enough. This is because theories are a dime a dozen. There are myriad theories available. The problem is to develop a theory that interacts in significant ways with the cutting edge of science. Most crackpot theories do not do that. And that is why they are for the most part ignored. Also they are ignored by academics if you are not an academic, because they don’t believe that someone who is not doing this full-time and is employed in the field actually can get in touch with the cutting edge of science. Even people who are full-time physicists at university have a hard time connecting in a significant way with the cutting edge of science, so how would anyone else do. Anyway that seems to be their reasoning when ignoring independent scholars.

I would argue of course that independent scholars are just as likely if not more likely to be able to connect significantly with the cutting edge of a given discipline or science in general. Why is this. One reason is over specialization within academia. Someone not forced to stick to one discipline is more likely given enough hard work across disciplines to see things that specialists cannot see. Another reason is that Independent scholars who are funding their own work are not tied to what grant committees think are important. Independent scholars just do their work on what fascinates them and may even have more time to dedicate to their subject than academics who are embroiled in the educational system. But on the other hand there are severe handicaps for the independent scholar. First of all if they are not teaching they are not going over and over the basics of their field on a regular basis. And if they are not attending conferences in their field then they don’t actually know what is going on in it. And they are unlikely to have colleagues in the field with whom they can discuss their ideas. So the independent scholar is unlikely to know what is going on in the field in a way that is continually updated and fresh in their minds. And so what is more likely is that they will have some idea of it from when they were studying at school which they continue to develop as they read further, but they are hopeless ly out of date without knowing it. From all this we can see that there are both plusses and minuses concerning the position of the independent scholars position toward their field.

What has changed of course is the internet. The role of the public scientist has been enhanced by the internet because it is possible for the independent scholar to publish their papers on the Internet without filtering by journal editors. But unfortunately a culture of serious conversation and deep consideration and debate of issues on the internet has not formed yet. So there is really no audience for the work of independent scholars among others who consider themselves public scientists. One of the major barriers is the fact that scientific papers are locked behind firewalls that most people do not have access to who are not part of a university. This is a huge barrier to scholarship. But even if open source journals take off the real problem is that outside of academia the public has not organized itself yet to act as a community of public scientists so that they can consider what Independent Scholars have come up with along with what is relevant produced in academia to help determine what is relevant and what is not relevant in our general search for meaningful contributions to the cutting edge of science. The point is that for the most part science has become so esoteric that most people cannot relate to it at all, less well come to terms with its cutting edge in a significant ways. Fundamentally, if you have not dedicated your life to it as an academic then you are unlikely to know enough to contribute. But on the other hand there are extraordinary people who exist in this world who break this general rule, but then those people do not have the channels to get their ideas out to others so that they can be seriously considered. In general the best way to get ones ideas out for others to consider is to attend conferences and give papers. The next way is to write articles for the core journals in your field. And of course there is always the path which is tried and true which is to write a book that explains your TOE to everyone. But the sad fact is that even if it is the next best then since sliced bread it is unlikely to attract attention either within the field of your choice or among the scientific public.

One reason is that many people are claiming what you are claiming. And for the most part they are wrong about the importance and significance of their work. And the chances are that you too are wrong. Science is about power relations rather than knowledge for the most part. Knowledge is a secondary concern. The institutions of Science, academia, have been set up to keep people like you out and to make sure you do not have an impact. Only special people who get grants and get positions in universities are considered worthy of trying to come up with something important in their fields. Of course, these roadblocks have been more of less rendered ineffective by the internet, but still because the scientific public has not organized itself to consider more than whatever comes out of academia as significant, it is unlikely that other theories not supported by the academic power structure will get considered outside of academia, and they are certainly not going to get considered inside of academia, as its whole raison d’être is to take care of its own.

Think of it this way. Your TOE is really your education. Buy developing it, if it really is any good, has been an educational journey. And that is worth while in itself regardless as to whether anyone else recognizes it. As independent scholars we really do have to be completely independent. In other words we are independent in as much as we fund our own studies. We are independent from the strictures of academia, which makes it possible to move across the lines of the specialties when those in academia are loth to do that because of the repercussions on their precious careers. We are independent in our assessment of what is the cutting edge of the discipline to which our work responds. And we should be independent of whether or not our work attracts attention or not. In other words it all gets back to motive. It is good to share what you can as you can of what you have done, if you think it is important to the field. But whether or not the field takes any notice should be irrelevant to you. Present your work at conferences, write some articles, publish a book on your work, and then move on to further research, further education. And if you continue to educate yourself you may find that what you thought was the ANSWER to EVERYTHING was in fact wrong and only interesting to you because of what you did not know at that time. And eventually you may discover an even deeper theory of everything, but then you will have the experience to know that this is probably not the ultimate in knowledge either.

Lets go back to Socrates. The Delphic Oracle said he was the wisest of men. So he went around questioning people who were deemed knowledgeable to find out why that might be so. What he found out was that his wisdom lay in the fact that he did not think he knew anything, while everyone else thought they knew. Having a Theory of Everything is tantamount to thinking you know something that others do not know. Something that gives you the right to pontificate and that should make others listen. But probably as with the various sophists and philosophers who Socrates questioned this is probably a self-generated illusion, and when it comes down to it, you probably need to go back to your studies and learn more and you just have not realized that is the best course yet. Who gets attention and who is ignored is not fair but is about the distribution of power more than it is about knowledge. So it may be that you really do have something important to say. In which case you should record the fact that you discovered what ever it is you think you have found which is so astounding, and then move on, getting on with your education, because guess what, you can spend a lifetime waiting to be recognized and never get recognized. So you need to think whether that is the reason you are doing what you are doing. Is it to get recognized or to gain knowledge. Gaining knowledge is endless. Even if you have a TOE you have not exhausted the depths of knowledge that is possible to have, and I suggest you fix your gaze on what you do not know and move on to those greener pastures, after you have made your mark in the sand by letting others know about your theory. This way when you find out what your TOE was not all you thought it might be, you will be less embarrassed because after learning more you will be the first to say what its defects are. And by identifying its defects first, you will earn more respect than if you had produced something and never realized what was wrong with it.

Knowing what we actually know is one of the hardest things to do. The best policy is to assume ignorance unless proved otherwise after much testing of your own ideas.

The best way to become educated is to follow what fascinates you, what ever that is. If you do that then studying is never an effort because your fascination takes you through the work without effort no matter how hard that work is that is needed. On the other hand if you are studying what you should because you are told that is the only way to make a living, or because that is what your parents want you to do, or for any other reason than you deeply involved with the subject due to your own intrinsic interest in it, then studying is very hard, if not impossible. Now some people can do what they are supposed to do or are told to do and can get through it. Other people find this very difficult. I am one of those people who cannot study unless I really want to know the answer to something. So it just turned out that those intrinsic interests of mine led to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. If my interests had led somewhere else that is where I would have ended up. I guess this is more or less saying I did not choose it but it chose me. I spent nine years in England studying what ever fascinated me and somehow that amounted to a Ph.D. During that time I became interested in Software Engineering and Systems Engineering via Systems Theory and ended up making that a career. Later I did another Ph.D. in Systems Engineering in order to get a qualification in my career area of choice. My advice is to study what fascinates you while you have the chance to study what ever you want in school, and then work out how that allows you to make a living later as you figure out what kind of work fascinates you. If you study many different subjects then you can easily absorb new ones and essentially that allows you to grow into what ever it is that you need to do next along the way.

True to form I am going to think about this question in terms of Heidegger’sBeing and Time which I have been commenting on at Thinknet. But first a side reference to Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. Purpose is what he calls an ententional phenomena based on absential eventities referenced and interpreted by ourselves but which are actually things that are missing from our physical existence. Ententional and abstential are neologisms that Terrence Deacon made up to refer to phenomena like purpose which only appears in life, and consciousness and the social but has nothing to do with physical matter per se except in as much as it is an absence, something missing.

Heidegger of course makes a major theme out of death, and says that it is the only way for Dasein (being there, being-in-the-world) to become authentically individuated as a self within the context  of the mitsein (They, One, or what Lacan calls the Big Other). Basically Heidegger says we never experience Death itself, but only the anticipation of it that leads to an existential anxiety that expresses itself in Fallenness, i.e. the ultimate groundlessness of our existence.

So interestingly your question contains Dying which is something that we all do, but none of us experience, to the extent that when we are dead we have no experience, it is always something in the future even if it is imminent. On the other hand you have an ententional phenomena of purpose, which is something always absent at least physically. So it appears that your question contains nihilistic opposites, i.e. something never experienced verses something that is never here. Both are always in the future. That is why Heidegger says that we are always oriented toward the future, one giving purpose to our life and the other recognizing the ultimate end we can foresee because we have seen others come to that end. If it is true that this question contains nihilistic opposites in tandem then our real question is how do we make the non-nihilistic distinction between the two. Clearly if both of them are future then that must be counter weighted by the past which is related to thrown befindlichkeit (foundness, or mood). The nihilism of the future certainly engenders a mood of depression, a withdrawal from life because of the uselessness of it. But according to Heidegger that is really just covering over the anxiety about death that permeates everything that must be overcome in order to seize life resolutely and authentically.  This more or less says as we might  have imagined that the non-nihilistic distinction between past and future is in the present. And in fact in Old German there were only two tenses complete and incomplete. Both future and past are complete from that point of view. What is incomplete contains the now and virtual co-now of the mythic. We lost the mythic co-now in the symmetry breaking between the mythopoietic and metaphysical eras so that is why the future tense is given extra emphasis in the metaphysical era. Anyway that is a clue for why the nihilistic opposites of death and purpose both appear in the future. But it is also a clue as to what needs to be done to get out of this nihilistic situation. One answer is hedonism of the present. But that is also nihilistic. Another answer is just carry on as expected which is also nihilistic. But another answer is to realize that each moment in the present has a virtual co-present that haunts it. That virtual moment is mythic and contained in logos as its existential. That existential is unassigned to any of the standard three temporal ecstasies.

What gave life meaning for the Heros of myth was to have their story told by bards, and scops down  though time because their lives and deeds had been so glorious. Each of us constructs as self though narratives we invent about ourselves to establish our identity.  When we are living our mythic journey within a self-constructed narrative that makes sense to us we feel as if our life has meaning. One can interpret this as the fusion of the now of the present with the co-now of the mythic as expressed in Logos. The now of the present from the point of view of Heidegger is only Falling. But he says that we can have if we are authentic a moment of vision which goes beyond mere falling. That vision gets expressed as the mythic narrative that informs our lives, that we make up and live every day based on what happens. Just as really past and future are the same peterite tense so to the now and virtual co-now that Deleuze talks about are the same ultimately. Lack of meaning comes from our banishment of the mythic in the metaphysical era. But the mythic is not just any story we happen to make up, it is rather a story built out of archetypes that explores our archetypal milieu as Jung and Hillman understand it. An excellent example recently come  to light is Jung’s Red Book which encapsulates his struggle to bring mythic meaning into his own life. Jung’s answer would have been “Get a Red Book of your own and start inscribing your own archetypal mythology to support your experience of the now by the mythic co-now that haunts it.” This goes back to Plato who called the WorldSoul a moving image of Eternity in time, and also a realization of change and changelessness at the same time, i.e. a supra-rational view of life. Every thing is changing and everything is staying the same and the intersection of those two when held together in our contemplation gives insight into the nature of existence. It is not a contradiction, paradox, or absurdity but in fact a supra-rational state in which myriad opposites are true simultaneously without interfering, which we see as interpenetration or intra-inclusion. This is at least a Zen or DzogChen way of looking at the situation. Every moment is nondual without any hint of cardinality (one, two, multiple). We are actually in that state all the time, but we only realize it rarely. That state is full of meaning that flows out of manifestation through the void or emptiness into our  lives at every moment, if we but knew.

So the real question is why we don’t experience that ecstasy continuously? Heidegger would put it down to our immersion and lostness in Mitsein (the They). Various traditions call the problem Dukkha, Maya, Dunya, which are various ways of indicating illusion. Life naturally fills with meaning pouring out of the non-cardinal states (non-monist, non-dual, non-plural) if we don’t block it or ignore it. Our natural state is to be flooded by meaning coming from nowhere to inform our lives with things like purposes, values, virtues, order, rta, good, fate, archetypal sources of existence, roots of self-manifestation. In that state the nihilistic question does not arise. The nihilistic question that saps the world of meaning arises only in the nihilistic state that covers over the ecstasy of existence which is either interpreted as empty by Buddhists or void by Taoists. The emptiness of existence or its void nature is the prerequisite for the cup of existence being filled by meaning. We always search for that libation bearer from whose hands we long to drink that long forgotten wine.

Considering General Schemas Theory using Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference which makes a difference,” (how) can we inform ourselves with the difference-making schema of pattern-breaking (using both information and meaning)?

I am blown away by this question. Someone actually read one of my papers and asked an intelligent question. It may take me a while to get my bearings in order to respond.

Not only that but someone else apparently responded probably better than I could myself.

***Now for a pause while I reflect on the rarity perhaps cosmic uniqueness of this phenomenon***

Like Craig Weinberg I am having difficulty understanding the import of the question.

But it is always good to back up and try to lay some groundwork. My answer will probably be skewed by the fact that I have been re-reading Being and Time by Heidegger and I also just read Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature which is to my mind a kind of rewriting of B&T within a present at hand mode but is relevant because it treats the Special Systems. The whole point of General Schemas Theory is to set the stage for approaching the nature of the Special Systems.

Terrence Deacon goes through all the basic concepts, like information, energy, entropy and tries to rethink then so there is a way to thing about the possibility of Life and Consciousness. In doing so he mentions Bateson’s Difference that Makes a Difference which is just a way of talking about Shannon information. But Terrance Deacon makes the point that we need Boltzman’s entropy to supplement Shannon’s idealization of information within a communication context, but we also need reference and interpretation as  well which is not part of Shannon or Boltzman’s view on the phenomena they are narrowly studying.

Bateson had a relational view of everything, and his motto about difference that makes a difference is a way of stating that in terms of information. In other words not all differences COUNT. It is only certain differences that are marked as making a difference. Like in the thermostat the temperature that it is set at counts, but not all the differences between the degrees it traverses on its way to the triggering threshold at which the air-conditional turns on again. These higher level differences are relational. They are the real information, the other distinctions are not significant but merely form the background for what is deemed significant either by reference to some ententional phenomena that is an absentional evenity in Terrence Deacon’s neologisms and you also need interpretation that is also outside the purview of the information exchange channel that Shannon is concerned with. So I suggest you see Terrence Deacon’s treatment of Bateson’s statement in Incomplete Nature go give a fuller context for the possible meaning of this phrase.

But also I think that Bateson also has in mind his meta-levels of learning, and one of the things about these meta-levels is that certain terms will mean something different at every meta-level. For instance Truth, Reality, Identity, and Presence change their meaning at every meta-level of Being.

I have another hierarchy I like to extol:

given
data
information
knowledge
wisdom
insight
realization

So we have to see that information does not stand on its own but is part of an emergent hierarchy between data and knowledge. Information contains surprises or as Bateson says differences that make a difference to somebody. One way to think about learning is in terms of the transformation of data into information and information into knowledge. But bateson comes up with a whole series of the meta-levels of learning, and at those various meta-levels I would not be surprised if the meaning of difference itself did not transform. For instance at the first level of learning we are attempting to identify significant information that coheres so we can commit it to memory which is our simplistic model of rote learning.

But Bateson goes on to talk about learning to learn.  How do we learn to learn, well that means identifying some higher order difference between learning techniques and attributing significance to their differences and perhaps selecting different techniques for different persons or occasions.

Then he goes on to learning to learn to learn. Whats that? And so on but it is obvious that difference at this level is different from the differences at the other levels. So one way I like to think about this is to say that differences between meta-levels of Being are in effect the greatest differences that we can make between anything within the worldview. And as it turns out we can take every schema though its meta-levels of Being and what we do when we do that is get different structures and that is what lets us know that the schemas are in fact radically different from each other, we might say incommensurable templates of understanding which we apply to comprehend the extent of something extant in spacetime.

So in effect what we have with the schemas are radical differences in comprehension of spacetime a prior synthesis that we project. But we show ourselves the fact that they are radically different in their essences by taking each one up the meta-levels of Being (commensurate with the meta-levels of learning) to see their difference which is set like and particular.

Because almost all of Batesons insights are tied one way or the other to Russell’s higher logical type theory I think Bateson is well aware of the different kinds of difference that appear at the various higher logical types and the differences between those types at each level. So in a sense there are pure differences that is rooted in the aspect of identity. But at each level of learning or Being these transform themselves into Deeper or Higher Order differences and Identities. That are themselves all different across meta-levels but also across schemas. And recognizing this is the deeper point that Bateson is indicating. Shannon did not really understand he was dealing with a type structure. But we know it now because our programming languages have type structures built in and information that is exchanged is done within the framework of a type system which by the way supplies some the nested redundancy needed to make the communication channel robust. So another thing that Bateson is indicating is that without understanding that information is structured by types itself, we do not really have a deep knowledge of information exchange. And Bateson I think was touting his relational model of systems as a way to get a deeper appreciation of what information is.

Of course here we must mention Deleuze and Difference and Repetition which studies this problem philosophically, and also his Logic of Sense which I think is the next book on from Russell’s Higher Logical Type Theory (summarized by Copi). I recommend your looking into Deleuze and the light he sheds on these issues.

Basically my story goes like this. Once upon a time there was the Western Tradition that really only recognized one schema which was Form and everything was understood in terms of that. But then Kant came along and suggested that System would be a good addition to the form Schema. Later Mendeleev identified the structural schema which became popular is Science and led to Structuralism as the competing schema to System in the last century. But when we look at the literature in science we can distinguish lots of other schemas that people talk  about now and again, so a general problem becomes what are all the schemas by which we preconceptually understand organization of things in spacetime when we project synthetic a prioris. Oddly enough no one seems to answered that question. I have looked high and low for a precursor in this topic alrea of General Schemas Theory. But once you have it then to kick it off you need a hypothesis about how many there are and how they are related to each other. So that is what the S prime hypothesis is suppose to accomplish getting General Schemas Theory going and getting the arguments started for different hypotheses. Unfortunately no one else has weighed in as yet, so my S prime hypothesis remains unchallenged. Fighters without opponents can hardly claim to be champions. But it stands to reason that there must be some a priori synthetic level beyond the system, because we have multiple types of schemas that we know of so what is the complete set and how are they related together is an open problem in our tradition.

It turns out that a way to understand all this is via the idea of meta-dimensions. Schemas are at meta-dimension zero which gives us n-dimensional space. Kinds of Being as Standings are at meta-dimension one, and Aspects are at meta-dimension two. Interestingly I think all these ideas are implicit in Russell and Bateson’s ideas but no one pulled them out for some reason. When Russell hit the paradox of a class being a member of itself and Godel gave his proof then it is as if the tradition abandoned this line of research into meta-levels and types. Bateson tried to show the are all around us in every discipline but few took up the calling of exploring this horizon of research further. It is not until Deleuze that we get any real advance over what Russell and Bateson were saying.

Amy way this is some background that might be worth considering and may help  you to rethink your question .

This problem has morphed over time and the current version is even more extreme which is the question posed by Badiou of the Multiple, i.e. pure Heterogeneity prior to the arising of the Ultra One which is the basis for both the One and the Many. In other words the One and Many is really a problem under the auspices of countability, but what is the heterogeneity prior to the arising of both One and Many. Badiou in Being and Event and other places calls that the Multiple. The problem is how does the Ultra One arise within the context of the Multiple to produce both One and Many. And the further question is the relation between that and the non-cardinal, i.e. non-dual or non-monadic non-conceptual and non-experiential states like Buddhist Emptiness and Taoist Void. How do non-cardinals relate to the Multiple. This is an open problem. The classic problem of One and Many is a kind  of non-problem because underlying both is countability. Another issue which is related is the problem of the relation between set-like and mass-like approaches to things, i.e. in language countable and non-countable nouns. For instance the Ultra One and the Multiple assume that what ever there is prior to countability is set-like rather than mass like. Heidegger on the other hand in Being and Time distinguishes between present-at-hand which is set-like and ready-to-hand which is mass-like modalities of apprehending things in the world by Dasein (being-in-the-world). Thus one of the flaws of Badiou’s idea of the Ultra One and the Multiple is that it is a present-at-hand distinction, and he does not recognize a corresponding ready-to-hand distinction which probably exists.

My own approach to this issue is to distinguish between Set and Mass and their logics which are Syllogistic and Pervasion logics. Sets are composed of particulars which are not repeated unless we allow Lists. Masses are composed of instances which when mixed give Solutions. An example of a Boundary or a Pervasion logic is Bricken’s use of G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form. This logic is expounded by N. Hellerstein in Diamond Logic and Delta Logic. Buddhist and Chinese logic in general are pervasion logics. Thus both Emptiness and Void both are thought in pervasion logic contexts. But when we ask what is the non-cardinal (non-dual and non-monadic) alternative to both set and mass then we could talk about ipsities in an aggregate. And with that idea we become free of the extreme of the Ultra One and the Multiple which is merely Set-like and for which we do not have an alternative which is Mass-like. However because there is Geometry and Topology we know that there must be such an opposite extreme even if it has not been formulated philosophically because our culture is oriented toward sets and away from masses.

But because we can re-pose the problem outside the realm of countability, i.e. in terms of sets and masses and their logics then we can talk about ipsities in an aggregate as being non-cardinal representations of the problem. But the question that is not known is whether there is a logic that goes along with Aggregates other than just the tetra-lemma itself (A, ~A, Both, Neither). Ipsities would in Buddhist terms be suchness. And of course Buddhism sees all phenomena as aggregates. To talk about an ipsity in an aggregates invokes reference: Thisness. And of course Thisness is Existential when an actual eventity is picked out from the aggregate. Ipsities are somewhat like what Kant calls singulars. We would expect them to be prior to the projection of a priori synthesis that gives rise to space, time and objects.  Space and Time are for Kant both singulars. But we are talking about what is prior to the arising of the object which first is suchness and later becomes Thisness before it shows its essence through the a priori projection of the categories. We might state that suchness appears in the interspace between the object and the noumena as the source of awareness before explicit intentionality of consciousness. Thisness would be the locus of focused awareness without positing a specific thing as such. From Thisness or reference we get eventually to pointing and grasping and thus ready-to-hand and present-at-hand modes of apprehension by Dasein. Dasein is specifically the part of the Human Being that does the a priori projections. Probably Suchness is prior to the SpaceTime projection and Thisness is after the spacetime projection and prior to the categorical projection. And so we are really pealing back the onion of the transcendental subject of appreception here. Suchness is raw sensation as such prior to its being localized, and Thisness is the localization of that sensation prior to its schematization. Schematization takes us into the projection of space and time as templates of intelligibility prior to recognizing what it is that sorts out this from that. Think of the automatic reaction to a snake-like form in your peripheral vision. You will be jumping away from it even before you know that it is there because this reaction is preprogrammed into our instinctual apparatus and occurs mostly unconsciously. What you react to unconsciously is suchness, but the localization of it that gives a vector to your escape that you find yourself doing even before you know anything is there is Thisness, a primordial reference to what you think is there before you even know what it is that orients you in space and time that you discover though your automatic behavior jumping away from it. All this must be prior to ascertaining it as a set or a mass like phenomena. It is a long way from such primordial reactions to the present-at-hand theoretical question of Ultra-one verses Multiple or later One verses Many. However, from the Buddhist perspective everything we see is suchness in aggregates. But suchness is a term for awareness of phenomena in general prior to its instantiation or particularization. When we discuss ipsities then that is something where we can focus on it even though we have not decide what it is yet. Ipsities are the stuff of references which will eventually be taken up by Dasein by pointing or grasping. With reference to Dasein itself they are called existentiells by Heidegger. But with respect to them being non-dasein I have called them ejects previously. Heidegger does not really give a name to what the corresponding non-dasein thing might be prior  to the arising of the difference between subject and object. One question might be how ipsities become either existentiells or ejects. Beyond that we might as how existentiell’s coalesce into existentials such as befindlichkeit, rede, verstehen and falling. On the other hand we can discuss how ejects become ontic and are considered eventually from an ontological perspective.

What we see  in normal everydayness is definitely not absolute reality in any sense. Normal perception is definite not it. But drug induced states are probably not it either. Meditation is probably the route to anything approaching it.

So this is a good departure point to talk about Being and Time by M. Heidegger which is a philosophical work in our tradition that touches on your question. He distinguishes the everydayness of the human self and its lostness in what is called Das Mann or the They which is everyday normal consensus reality. His book is about how one can individuate oneself from this consensus reality by thinking about death and becoming authentic. So for Heidegger you really only have to think about your own death to pull out of consensus reality and to see deeper into life and perhaps a greater reality.

DzogChen is a mess. At least that is my impression of it after spending a few years reading all the texts I could find that have been translated now about it. Thus the actual nature of DzogChen is obscure. Too obscure for my liking. I really could only find two texts that I am certain are in the mainstream of it which are Gold refined from ore by Manjushrimitra and Beacon of Certainty by Mipham. Fortunately the text of Manjushimitra is at the fountainhead of the tradition as he is the first main student of Garab Dorje. As an outsider I can make these assessments as I have nothing invested in that tradition. All I want is a clear explanation that makes sense in relation to Taoism and Buddhism. And because it spans to Bon it seems to fill the role of a bridge between Buddhism and Taoism within the context of Tibet. It is their equivalent to the Zen tradition in China which they rejected in a famous debate in which the foreigner lost. So my opinion is that meant they had to reinvent the equivalent of Hua Yen Buddhism and Zen Buddhism within their own tradition and in a Tantric context. Of course there was tantric Buddhism in China as well but it was not as pervasive as in Tibet. The sad thing is that we cannot really count on the practitioners of DzogChen to give us a good rendition of it, at least judging from available works. It is too mixed up in Shamanistic and Tantric practices. So we are left with a close reading of Manjushrimitra based on suggestions from Mipham. And there is one contemporary book from the Bon tradition that seems to fit into the same picture which is Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the Logic of the Nonconceptual: Anne Carolyn Klein, Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: 9780195178500: Amazon.com: Books.

Ok, now that we have the accepted sources out of the way, lets try to understand the nature of DzogChen. DzogChen is a Heresy of Buddhism that denies the two truths. Because it goes beyond Buddhism it can encompass both Buddhism and Bon. Unfortunately this is not saying much in Tibetan Buddhism because Bon and Buddhism look like twins. But originally Bon was like Taoism and Shinto, it was an indigenous wisdom tradition that was colonized by Buddhism. Isn’t it interesting that Buddhism is a kind of colonialist religion, taking after its Indo-european roots in this regard. If we look at Taoism instead of Bon then what we see there is that the emphasis is on the nondual Void, which is physical empty space as being the face of the nondual within nature. Buddhism on the other hand focuses on emptiness which is the nondual within consciousness, and the Buddhists deny the reality of physical nature. Buddhism is very phenomenological in this way. Ultimately there are two strands of nonduality which are interpretations of existence, one taking its departure from a denial of Being, and the other being naturally without Being in the first place since the Chinese have no Being in their languages since they are not Indo-European.

Buddhism distinguishes between mundane existence and nondual existence in terms of the two truths. DzogChen denies the two truths at the end of the whole tradition of the evolution of these truths within Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. DzogChen tries to point at a deeper nonduality which is completely nondual and not dually nondual as the difference between emptiness and void suggest. This difference between emptiness and void was alluded to in very sophisticated ways in later day Chinese Buddhism in Hua Yen Buddhism for instance. Tien Tai Buddhism is another example of a later Chinese sect that attempted to point toward a middle way beyond the two truths based on a possible misreading of a translated line in Nagarjuna. We can see that in the poetry of Stonehouse for example. The nature of DzogChen is to point toward the deeper nonduality before the arising of the difference between emptiness and void as two possible nonduals. In a sense it more or less loops the loop in the unfolding of Buddhism, more or less like Hegel attempts to finesse the transformation of Kant into time while still ultimately gaining the atemporal as well. Manjushrimitra uses the logical ploy’s of Nagarjuna against the two truths saying that they are extremes. It is ultimate because in it Buddhism comes full circle and becomes no different from Bon/Taoism. But going through that circle allows it to point to a deeper nonduality beyond emptiness and void, which I call manifestation. In Hua Yen that is called interpenetration and inter-inclusion of things in the jeweled net of Indra. In Sufism it is called Tajalliat of the Sifat. In Plato it is called the difference between Ratio and Doxa. The same thing was discovered in different traditions. But of course it is not exactly the same thing, as the fragrance of the tradition clings to what ever this deeper nonduality is called.

So we can say that the nature of DzogChen is to point at the deeper nonduality before the arising of the difference between emptiness and void.

Zen Koans are an example of Supra-rationality. This is something that is not well understood in the West. The problem is that of the limits of the Divided Line of Plato, it is the limit of contradiction, paradox and absurdity that we are obsessed with and so the possibility of supra-rationality is almost completely forgotten in our tradition, even though it is represented as a limit of the Divided Line in the Republic of Plato:  Analogy of the divided line.

The divided line divides experience into doxa and ratio. One limit is para-dox and the other is the supra-rational. Paradox is mixture and confusion.  Note the best example of a study of this is Godel Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.  From Quantum Mechanics this is entanglement. What we don’t have is a good example of the study of Supra-rationality in our tradition. Supra-rationality means that two opposite are true at the same time without interfering. From Quantum Mechanics this is superposition.

Supra-rationality can be seen in Zen Buddhism, and buddhism in general. This and other nondual traditions emphasize the Supra-rational over the Paradoxical. In the West it is part of our Orientalism to expect that Buddhists are mostly referring to Paradoxicality as a limit as we do. But that is part of our mis-understanding of other traditions to expect them to be like us. In fact they are mostly referring to the Supra-rational rather than the Paradoxical limits, because their tradition is the dual of ours in many ways.

There are other ways in which their tradition is essentially different from our own. For instance our tradition is for the most part Set based with syllogistic logic, while the Buddhist tradition is mostly Mass based with pervasion logic.

If we just take these two extreme difference we can see why the Buddhist tradition is so misunderstood in the West, and by Westerners in general. Many of the books that introduce Buddhism to the West are part of this Orientalist tendency. If we just take these two differences and we interpret Buddhist texts in terms of Pervasion Logic and Masses with Supra-rationality we will get a lot further than if we follow our own tradition and interpret everything in terms of Syllogistic Logic and Sets with Pradoxicality or Absurdity as the key to attempting to understand Buddhist texts.

When we see that emptiness pervades consciousness in Buddhism just as Void pervades nature in Taoism then we can understand these forms of nonduality better.

When we see that emptiness and void themselves are non-dual duals of each other then we must ask whether they are supra-rational, i.e. both true at the same time without interfering, or whether their interface with each other produces absurdity that we can see in Ultra Being.

One other problem is that the Indo-European tradition is the only one with Being. Buddhism denies Being with the concept of emptiness within the Hindu Indo-European tradition. China never had Being as part of their tradition because their languages are for the most part non-indo-european. It turns out that there are meta-levels of Being and that eventually those meta-levels run straight into existence, which in terms of Absurdity is seen as the singularity of Ultra Being. If Emptiness and Void are not supra-rationally separate them we get the absurd singularity of Ultra Being as our characterization of Existence.

But just as Emptiness and Void are dual nonduals, so too Absurdity and Supra-Rationality are duals as well. What is not well appreciated is the fact that the lines that divide the Divided Line need to be interpreted. There are three lines that which divide Doxa and Ratio, two of those lines divide each of the divisions of the line and one central line separates Ratio from Doxa. Void separates grounded and ungrounded opinion. Emptiness separates representable and non-representable intelligibles. These are the dual nonduals that are seen as either supra-rational or absurd. But there is also the middle line which represents ‘manifestation’ which is utterly nondual. It is this deeper nondual that is the object of Hua Yen Buddhism, of DzogChen, and Sufism. The deeper nondual is at the center of the Divided Line, not at its extremes. And this is the balance we are looking for in any path that claims to be a middle path. An excellent place to look at this deeper nonduality is the basis of the DzogChen tradition in  Mañjuśrīmitra‘s Gold Refined from Ore. Much of Zen Buddhism is based on Hua Yen Buddhism for its underlying theory. Zen Buddhism uses Koans to teach the variations on nonduality. We see in the work of Stonehouse for example the blending of Emptiness and Void, where there is one line of emptiness and one line of void in certain of his poems. Some Zen koans go beyond this and point directly to the underlying nonduality of nonduality, i.e. manifestation beyond the duality of Emptiness and Void discovered by later Chinese Buddhism. At first the Chinese thought that the Buddhists were saying the same thing as indigenous Taoists. But eventually they learned that Buddhist nonduality related to emptiness is different from Taoist nonduality of the void. Later Chinese explored the supra-rational relation between the two like Stonehouse. But of course it is clear that there must be something beyond that nondual duality which can be subtly indicated and attained if one were able to immerse oneself in what is primordial before the arising of the duality between emptiness and void. I call this primordial archetypal wholeness.

Zen Koans work by indicating states of nonduality that are supra-rational, or even deeper states beyond the duality of emptiness and void in which like Quantum Mechanics entanglement and superposition are them selves entangled and superpositioned in relation to each other. It is necessary to understand the theory as developed in Hua Yen Buddhism by Fa Tsang and others. These theories were developed further on Soto Zen by masters like Dogen Kaigen and others. Indicating states and transmission of states directly come from the indication within lived situations in which master and student are intertwined in subtle showing and hiding relations with each other. The Zen Koans are very deep when they point to emptiness, then point to void, then point beyond emptiness and void to what lies in kernel of existence. For instance at one point Dogen Kigen talks about Existence Time which is an example of this kind of pointing in the Shobogenzo.

What is really amazing is that although we live in the most dualistic of traditions, which has fought nonduality tooth and nail such as that embodied in the Western nondual heresy called Islam, at the very core of the tradition is the Divided Line that covers the entire spectrum of experience. And at the center of this core is the lines that divided the line, and they are the traces of emptiness and void, but more than that there is the trace of manifestation beyond the duals of emptiness and void as well. And so what is achieved in Sufism, in DzogChen, in Hua Yen Buddhism is there at the kernel of the Western tradition as well in spite of its vehement rejection of nonduality. As Nagarjuna showed logic has within it emptiness, as the difference between the logical operators. This proof is what causes Buddhism to be reabsorbed into Hinduism and gave rise to Advita Vedanta through Shankara’s nondual interpretation of the Upanishads. Similarly we show that the Dualistic Western tradition whose core gives rise to nihilism and emergence as meta-nihilistic opposites has at its center not just emptiness and void but the deeper nondual of manifestation. When we say ‘manifestation’ we take this word from M. Henry in his book called The Essence of Manifestation which is based on the ideas of Meister Eckhart who was the fundamental proponent of these ideas within the Western tradition who was one of the few of such proponents who were not murdered by the Inquisition. Henry accuses Heidegger of having an assumption of Ontological Monism that covers up the possibility of the Essence of Manifestation known by Meister Eckhart as the Godhead, and in Hinduism as the nirguna Brahman. Thus we have in the Western tradition our own Koans like the Divided Line of Plato that indicate various types of nonduality, and we have those who have explained them within our tradition even if they are very rare, like a white hair on a black bull. Thus we have everything that is necessary to understand Koans ourselves if we do not Orientalize by assuming that the radical Other is the same as ourselves.

Zen Koans work just as Plato says in the 7th Letter by staying close to one another seeking wisdom and beyond wisdom nous (prajna), and paying attention to the indications, until a divine spark jumps from soul to soul. Plato says that this practice is all that he is really interested in. And it is this same spark that has been jumping in the Zen tradition, the DzogChen tradition, and the Sufic tradition. And that spark can also still jump in the Western tradition if we take the Homeward Path, the path indigenous to our own tradition. Take that path and you will see wonders.